Publicity: Nailing an Media Interview, Part I

The most important thing to remember for any interview: stay on topic. I ask clients to repeat this like a mantra before they go on air, or even when on phone with a reporter.

A print reporter gets maybe 700 words to do your story. A TV or radio reporter has two minutes. So your interview shouldn't be hours long.

Donít give them more than they need. Itís too overwhelming for them, and can divert story to a tangent. Tangents have a place Ė in intellectual dialogue; when youíre talking among colleagues. Remember this formula always: in mediaworld, almost all time, tangent = someone elseís story, not yours, getting talked about.

Making the Intangible Real

Written by Robert F. Abbott

How do you make intangible real? How do you take an idea or concept, something that can't be seen or touched, and convey its essence to others, quickly and easily?

That challenge faces many of us in this age of information and knowledge marketing. In advertising and other marketing communications, we have to convince prospects to respond to words and ideas. Intangibility is a challenge I often face as I promote my communication products and services. My prospective customers can't touch or see what I'm selling.

It's a factor in employee communication, as well as in marketing communication. After all, what are you selling when you ask employees to get behind new plan or to work safely?

Every once in a while I come across something that bridges gap between tangibility and intangibility in a single bound.

One of my former newsletter client companies developed software that provides stereographic (like 3-D) views of oil and gas reservoirs. Now, I've seen many of this company's developments in reservoir simulation over past 10 years or so, but this one was special.

Why? Because to use this software, you put on 3-D glasses. Like kind we wore in movie theaters in 1950s, albeit much more sophisticated.

For my client, significance of software is its ability to run on regular desktop computers, which makes it more affordable than existing software. For its customers, mostly engineers in oil companies, view is thing: it can make or save them millions of dollars.